How to Do Change Well
Earlier this year I saw a LinkedIn post from the psychologist Susan David that referenced “accepting the loss inherent in choice.” This hit me like a ton of bricks. It referenced the avalanche of “what ifs” I was struggling with in debating whether to make a difficult change in my career.
Making big choices and changing are not something we’re taught how to do. I think it’s expected that we learn how… that’s what getting older is for. I don’t think getting older makes us better at accepting the loss and discomfort of change. In truth, most of us don’t know how to do change well because there’s no place in our development and schooling where we learn how to do it well. Except therapy. I really value therapy for that.
My guest Lori Gottlieb is a therapist and bestselling author whose book I Think You Should Talk to Someone has sold over 1,000,000 copies and is being made into a TV show. She knows how to change. Why?
Before she was a bestselling author, Lori dropped out of Stanford Medical School (acceptance rate 1.19%) because being a doctor wasn’t right for her. She became a journalist and writer, and then she turned down a huge book advance -- just said, no thanks-- became a therapist, and kept the faith that the right book project would find her.
Gottlieb’s book features the relationship between Lori and her own therapist, Wendell. Wendell is a wise character and at one point he tells Lori, “The nature of life is change. And the nature of people is to resist change.”
So what do we do with that?
Like Susan David, Lori says “change is really hard because with change comes loss. So people will stay in a situation that they're stuck in for a very long time, because there's something about the familiar that feels safe. And when you make a change, you're going to lose the familiar. You have to grieve the familiar. Even if the familiar was miserable, you still are giving something up.”
The most important thing to remember, says Gottlieb, is that change is a process. It’s not an action. There are stages to change. Here is what Lori laid out for us:
The first stage is pre-contemplation, where we don't even know that we're thinking about making a change. It's just kind of there outside of our awareness.
Then there's contemplation: now we're aware that we're thinking about changing, but we're not ready to do anything about it. We all know the feeling of “I need to do something about it, but yeah, I'm gonna kind of go into denial about this. I'm not really gonna think about it.”
Preparation is next. We're taking the steps to prepare, to make the change. Bringing it into reality. Asking: what do we need to do? We do our research. We figure out what ‘would I do if I were to make this change, what would it look like?’ It's logistical, it's practical.
Action is where we make the change. And people mistakenly think that that's where it ends. Action. You've made the change.
The most important step in the stages of change is the last one: maintenance. Says Lori, “The big misconception is that people think that if you slip up- and you will, that you failed changing. But you're going to have setbacks, like “I was going to get healthy and I was gonna do this, but oh, I ended up having two pieces of cake today. Oh, well --see it didn't work. So I'm just gonna be unhealthy.”
Lori says, “This is normal. This is part of change is that you are going to slip back and you are going to be really compassionate with yourself. Self-compassion is crucial to the maintenance phase. People think that if they self-flagellate that they're gonna be more accountable. No, when you self-flagellate, you are bathed in shame. You're just criticizing yourself. You feel bad about yourself. You can't do anything positive when you're in that state, you have to be in a place of self-compassion so that you can be accountable to yourself.
It's part of the process. Be kind to yourself. And then get back up and go back on track tomorrow. “The more you do that, the more practice you have of going back and getting on track, the less you're going to slip back. And then these new habits are going to be integrated into your daily life. You're going to get more used to them. They're going to feel less unfamiliar. You're going to feel more comfortable with them.”